


Blood and Iron

by orphan_account



Category: Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Avengers Movies RPF, Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Fluff and Angst, Gen, Tony Angst, Whump
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-03-03
Updated: 2013-03-02
Packaged: 2017-12-04 03:24:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 6
Words: 1,773
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/705972
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tony Stark is human under the armor. He has weaknesses and flaws and issues and nightmares. He'll never admit it, but under the armor, he's flesh and bone, just like everyone else.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Plans

He is falling from space, breath stolen by the vacuum, stars filling his fading vision, and he smiles, like Yensin had. Even though he hadn’t known about the nuke for more than five minutes, there was a sort of rightness to things, a feeling that he was meant for this.

  
His lips form the words that have been ringing in his head since he first stepped out of the cave into the Afghanistan sun, but there is no air here to catch them. It’s okay, it’s not his voice this sentence was made for. The universe spins dizzyingly around his oxygen-starved head, the star in his chest dying.

  
_This was always the plan._


	2. The Worth of Steel

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tony doesn't need Captain America to spell out how worthless he is.

Captain America hates his guts, which is absolutely par for the course. Of course the hero his father had ignored him in favor of thought Tony was a waste of space.  He remembers the war posters, the candid shots and clips of blurry video which his father had carefully preserved in lieu of the hero himself. Mostly, the Captain Rogers depicted in them was smiling nobly, or wearing an expression of determination.  Tony himself had never been able to deny how intrinsically _good_ this man appeared to be, and he still couldn’t, even with the face he’d worshipped as a child and hated as a teen spat insults at him. The face that had been hope to an entire country looked at Tony with disgust, and asked, “ _Big guy in a suit of armor. Take that off and what are you?_ ”

Dead. He would be dead, and worse than that, useless. Because under that suit is nothing but a selfish, guilty man with a chest full of patient death. Captain America can see past the armor right into Tony’s shredded, black heart, and Tony is less than nothing before a ninety-pound weakling who’d become the very icon of American strength. The good Captain is the embodiment of freedom, justice, liberty and  _truth,_ and if he says that Tony's not worth the air he's breathing, Tony will believe him. He won't even need to be convinced. 

He already knows he's worthless without the suit anyways.


	3. The Dynamite Man

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tony Stark is a dangerous man.

He’s walking around with a bomb in his chest, and nobody knows.

There’re literal _pieces_ of bomb in his chest, of course, fragments of a StarkTech Red Death rocket trapped in his soft tissues, grating against the remains of his ribcage. But what he’s talking about is the miniature sun running circles under his collarbone. There’s a reason he hasn’t made arc reactors available for public use, even with the toxic palladium core—it’s not like anyone else would be embedding one in their skin, where the discharge could do them harm—even though it’s a green revolution waiting to happen. He guards the arc reactor fiercely, because Tony knows (and only Tony, though SHIELD suspects) that it’s literally the work of minutes to turn the arc reactor from stable, focused energy generator to a bomb that would make Nagasaki look like the fourth of July. It can’t happen on accident—there are a few easy-to-come-by parts he would need to weaponize the arc—or he would never have set foot on a battlefield. If there was even a tiny chance of the arc getting damaged and exploding, he would have invented something else to wear. Maybe hooked up the old car battery. 

In a strange way, it’s fitting. The original arc was made from Stark weapons, made with the intent to power something that would kill everyone in Tony’s way. Now the arc was used to power _the_ Stark weapon, and, like Tony himself, when focused, is as lethal as anything in the world. It’s just when that focus is lost that things become dangerous.

So Tony wanders around with a bomb in his chest, nobody the wiser. It’s okay, though, because that’s not the bomb they should be worried about. The real one to fear is the one ticking away in Tony’s head, because there’s _nothing_ more dangerous than Tony’s brain.


	4. The Stuff of Dreams

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> No one ever asks, but he was awake.

He was awake.                                                                                                  

Nobody ever asks if he was. He’s not sure if they already know, if they don’t want to know, haven’t thought about it, or just don’t care, but he was awake the whole time. And mostly, he was screaming.

Because why waste anesthesia on a hostage that was probably going to die anyways? Who was _supposed_ to die?

So, yes, he was awake when they strapped him down with coarse hemp ropes to their makeshift operating table, harsh light from bare bulbs in his eyes. He was awake when Yensin dug out all the little bits of metal and desert that had perforated his skin, and if he thought it was painful, it had nothing on when the quiet little doctor pried open his ribcage an attached a car battery to an electromagnet and then straight on to his actual, still-beating heart. He felt it, those delicate steady fingers deep inside him where nothing but fluids and flesh were ever supposed to be.  He doesn’t pass out—he can’t pass out--wide eyes rolling around the room, incoherent with pain and confusion, until Yensin’s stitched him back up like a torn teddy bear.

It’s worse the second time.

By the time the arc reactor is ready, he’s had the car battery in for six days. His chest is starting to heal, despite all his captors have continued to inflict on him. But the arc’s bigger than the few wires Yensin had jury-rigged, and he still doesn’t have anything to alleviate the pain of surgery.

Yensin ties him down, not the guards, checking to make sure he can’t move and padding the rough ropes with bits of towel. He doesn’t meet Tony’s eyes because they’re clenched shut, as though it will keep the pain out. His eyes fly open as soon as the scalpel slices through his skin, but he doesn’t start screaming until Yensin takes a hole saw and puts a perfect circle though his breastbone. He’s a little proud of that. There’s that same feeling of fingers-where-they-shouldn’t-be, maybe worse the second time around. The doctor takes some time to try to re-attach muscles and make room for the utterly enormous piece of technology Tony’s decided to stuff into his own chest. He’s awake and trying to scream long after his voice is gone. He blacks out when Yensin finally seats the reactor in place, the rush of energy pushing his overtaxed brain past the point of exhaustion.

When Tony has nightmares of Afghanistan it’s not of the waterboarding—not on his revised scale of nightmares. He does have dreams of the tortures he suffered at the Ten Ring’s tender mercies, and yeah, it sucks. But the dreams that have him waking up screaming are of a short, kind-hearted man who was unwilling to shoot even at the men who had murdered his family, who was soft-spoken and brilliant and generous unto death. But all Tony remembers of Yensin when he’s dreaming is the feeling of his fingertips touching his fragile heart, and the absolute agony of it all.

Because he’d been awake the whole time, and he remembered.


	5. Valley Forge

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He learns a lot of lessons in school. None of them are from textbooks.

When Tony is seven, his dad sends him off to military school.  Howard Stark is a weapons manufacturer, and he thinks it will do his son some good to get a taste of what his future clients will be like. It doesn’t matter to him that the next youngest student at the school is twelve, and that Tony is a full foot shorter than all of his unit mates. The Stark name and fortune are enough to make exceptions to the rules that would usually bar someone as young as Tony. 

Tony is too smart and too small and too straightforward and too brutally honest to get along with the other boys in his unit, and his tendency to correct his teachers looses him any allies his money might have won him among the staff. Instead, they turn a blind eye to the bullying that inevitably descends on the child. They can’t help but think he’s asking for it, mouthing off at the bigger kids with the same defiant impudence he displayed when he humiliated them in front of their classes. They ignore the desperation in his dark, glittering eyes as he is slowly surrounded.

The exercise program the school runs is designed to push the students to their limits and make them stronger, but Tony’s limits are significantly narrower than the rest of the student body’s. No matter how determined he is to keep up, he’s only seven, and his legs are still short. He tries as hard as he can, but he winds up lost on the trails several times when his unit is taken on runs in the woods. He’s clever enough to find his way back to campus eventually, but by then someone’s kicked up a fuss, and he gets in trouble for making people waste time trying to figure out where he is.

He stays enrolled at the academy until he graduates, because his father is paying them enough that they won’t kick him out. By the time he leaves, he’s fourteen, and much smarter than when he started. He doesn’t get lost when they’re running, because he’s all legs now, and he can keep pace even with the eighteen-year-old seniors. The staff have given up on trying to control him, having figured out that no matter how hard you hit Tony Stark, he’ll just get back up and laugh at you for failing.

He learns a lot in military school. He learns that the people who are supposed to like him  don’t, and the people who are supposed to help him won’t. He learns how to take a hit and give one back twice as strong.  He learns that the only person who’s looking out for him is himself.


	6. Ball and Chain

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He would rather die.

There was an obvious answer to the Palladium poisoning, but Tony had refused.

The car battery, of course. Crude, yes, but he could have made a more efficient battery, prettied it up.  He’d have to modify the arc housing, but that would be simple enough.

He didn’t because of what the car battery was to him. He let the cold fusion star in his chest leak toxin into his fragile body instead, because he would _never_ be that man again. That man in the cave, who was powerless and tethered,  bound by the heart held in his hands. The car battery was imprisonment and helplessness. Vulnerability. He’d promised himself and the memory of Yensin that he’d never be that again.

He would let himself die first.

**Author's Note:**

> The drabbles in this series aren't necessarily related or in any particular order. There's not really any storyline. Sorry.


End file.
